Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (43 page)

There was a drop in shoplifting so massive that the department store chain Marks and Spencer’s
⁴⁶
publicly praised the policy and decided to sponsor the first World Conference on Harm Reduction and Drug-Taking in Liverpool in 1990. There, one of the police officers inspired by John’s experiment, Derek O’Connell, explained: “As police officers,
⁴⁷
part of our oath of office is to protect life . . . Clearly, we must reach injectors and get them the help that they require, but in the meantime we must try and keep them healthy, for we are their police as well.”
But John was about to whack into the same wall as Henry Smith Williams.

With a few of his colleagues, John was invited to tour the United States to explain how this policy could save American lives.

Everywhere they went, at the end of the meeting, they were told the same thing—that the Republican congressman Jesse Helms had been pressuring the organizers to shut them down and shut them up. Helms didn’t want anybody to interfere with the war on drugs. A few years later, on a CNN phone-in show,
⁴⁸
a caller thanked him for “everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers,” and he replied by saluting the camera and saying: “Well, thank you, I think.”

After an item about John’s clinic was broadcast on one of the top-rated news shows in the United States,
60 Minutes
, in 1991, John was phoned by Bing Spear, the chief inspector of the Drugs Branch of the Home Office.

“We’ve got a lot of heat
⁴⁹
from our embassy in Washington,” he warned. “They’ve got on to [the government] saying, ‘What’s this about somebody in Liverpool giving out crack cocaine? Close it down immediately!’ ”

The Conservative government decided to “merge” John’s clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean—a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters. John was powerless
⁵⁰
to help them.

The results came quickly. In all the time Dr. Marks had been prescribing, from 1982 to 1995,
⁵¹
he never had a drug-related death among his patients. Now Sydney, the Liverpool docker, went back to buying adulterated crap on the streets and died. Julia Scott, who said she would be dead without her prescription, was proved right: she died of an overdose, leaving her daughter without a mother.

Of the 450 patients
⁵²
Marks prescribed to, 20 were dead within six months, and 41 were dead within two years. More lost limbs and caught potentially lethal diseases. They returned to the death rate for addicts under prohibition: 10 to 20 percent,
⁵³
similar to smallpox.

Dr. Russell Newcombe, who had worked in the clinic, tells me the survivors “were immediately forced back onto the street . . . People who had jobs lost them. It split relationships up. People rapidly went back into debt and crime. The average person thrown off John Marks’s prescription regime would have been back in acquisitive crime within a month.” Whenever he’d see one of them in the street, he’d ask them what they were doing now. “Grafting,” they’d say—the local word for stealing to support your habit.

Today, Merseyside is riddled with drug addiction, and drug gangs are killing each other in the war for drugs.

John found he was blacklisted within his own country. He ended up literally at the other end of the earth, in Gisborne, the farthest corner of New Zealand, the place from which he told me his side of the story by telephone in 2012.

“I was exiled,” John Marks told me. One day, the Royal Astronomical Society asked him to play Galileo at an open day. He had to playact being burned at the stake. His voice softened at the irony. But when I said to him this story made me angry, he replied, flatly: “Whatever gave [you] the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.”

And so his story was supposed to go the same way as Henry Smith Williams’s. It was supposed to be forgotten. But this time, something was different.

I got on a plane to Geneva, the Swiss city where Harry Anslinger first went to the United Nations to force his vision on the world. It was there, in a sweet twist of history, that his grip was finally being broken. I sat with the woman who—along with others—pioneered this change, and she began to tell me her story. It had been inspired—without him knowing it—by John Marks.

The police officer who accompanied Ruth Dreifuss had tears in his eyes. He was taking the future president of Switzerland through an abandoned railway station in Zurich, down by the river. All the local drug addicts had been herded there, like infected cattle.

Ruth had been looking out over scenes like this for years now. A few years before, she had been to the park in Bern that played the same role there. There were girls being openly prostituted out and there were addicts staggering around, out of control, incoherent. There were people injecting themselves “in places you couldn’t imagine,” she says, because every other vein couldn’t be traced, as if it was trying to escape. Above the bustle, dealers were yelling their prices at the top of their voices. As she heard them, Ruth thought of Wall Street
⁵⁴
brokers, barking on the trading floor. The threat of violence hung over everything as dealers fought for customers.

Most Swiss people had never seen anything like this. The police were not just crying; they were afraid. This was Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was an affront to everything the Swiss thought
⁵⁵
about themselves.

Switzerland has always been the place on earth where it is easiest to pretend nothing ever changes, and everything makes sense. My father is a mountain boy from the Swiss Alps, and in his village, you were raised to believe that the country’s last major upset was when Hannibal invaded the mountains with his elephants in 221
b.c
. All the country’s symbols are about order and cleanliness and permanence. Swiss watches will tick-tock with scientific precision even after a nuclear holocaust. The postcards show the thirty-foot-high cleansing jet of blue water waving out from Lake Geneva into the sky, with the Alps motionless and unchanging in the distance. It is, the Swiss will tell you gravely, a criminal offense to flush your toilet
⁵⁶
after ten o’clock at night, because it might disturb your neighbors.

But now, Switzerland was watching as drug prohibition created tornadoes in the middle of its pristine clockwork cities. Ruth Dreifuss didn’t know it yet as she walked through this scene, but soon she was going to become the first female president of Switzerland and the first Jewish president of Switzerland.

Even more significant, she would become the first president in the world since the 1930s who decided to run not away from drug reform, but toward it. She dedicated her presidency to sitting with addicts, listening to addicts, defending addicts—and getting them a legal supply of their drugs.

I first learned about her when drug policy experts began to say that there was one political leader in the world who really understood what was wrong with the drug war better than anyone else. I wrote to her at once. That’s how I found myself, in early 2013, in her apartment, as she chain-smoked and flicked her ash into a big yellow ashtray. She apologized for the smoke. “I am an addict!” she said, and laughed.

When Billie Holiday was in prison for heroin possession in the United States, the only people who tried to help her were Swiss. “A wonderful couple
⁵⁷
in Zurich, Switzerland, sent me a thousand dollars,” she wrote, “and a telegram telling me that America would never accept me when I got out, so I should come to them in Europe.”

Switzerland is—like all countries—in a constant tussle between its compassion and its cruelty. As that letter was being written, Ruth was at a Swiss school where the other kids would sometimes taunt her, saying that the Jews had assassinated Jesus and would have to be punished forever. Later, Ruth was told that as a woman, she was hysterical and emotional and couldn’t be entrusted with the vote. If they ever let her cast a ballot, the country’s politicians warned, Switzerland’s families would fall apart and the nation would descend into chaos. It was only after she and thousands of others marched and demanded for years that Swiss women were finally enfranchised in 1971. So Ruth Dreifuss had seen how even the most concrete of certainties can fall apart and seem crazy to the next generation.

When Ruth was put in charge of Switzerland’s health policy in 1993, there was a corpse waiting in her in-tray. Switzerland had the worst HIV epidemic
⁵⁸
in Europe, and nobody could see an end to it. This country has no ghettoes where addiction could be hidden away. There are no Us and Them in Swiss chalets: if chaotic drug use is happening, it happens where everyone can see. So she gathered into her office representatives of the country’s most despised minorities—gays, prostitutes, and junkies—because she suspected that they held not only the problem but also the solution to the AIDS crisis. She found that sex workers, if you arm them with condoms and information, are actually “very good public health agents. But you have to trust them. You have to accept their job. So prevention begins with respect.”

As a socialist, she had always believed that everyone—no matter how seemingly lost—can be empowered if you do it right. But she looked at the drug addicts and asked herself: How?

In the fight against AIDS, Switzerland had already built good needle exchanges, provided safe consumption rooms where addicts could go to take their drugs, and prescribed methadone. Still the disease raged. It turned out that many addicts loathe methadone: they compare it to a flavorless lump of dough when you have a ravenous craving for steak. One day, some of the street doctors Ruth talked to all the time told her that they had been
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to visit an experiment in Liverpool, England—a program with startling results, even though the ideologues were shutting its doors.